You Should Really Start A Blog

Obviously the correct spelling is 'lolz'

2012-01-24T21:13:00.000+11:00

I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SUPERFLUOUS APOSTROPHES APPEAR IN THE BANNER ADS OF NATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Is temporally compartmentalising yourself is the first step to madness?

2012-01-16T00:33:00.000+11:00

Dear My Future Self (circa 7:30am tomorrow morning),

You are probably feeling very tired because you are sleep deprived and have a heinously early start to get to a location even more north of Sydney than North Sydney. Why are you sleep deprived? Because I -- your own self, from less than seven hours ago -- did my (your) groceries at an abysmally late hour, then dropped into Kmart to buy tupperware and an eyelash curler, then filled up at a petrol station several suburbs away, and then drove to the foreshore for no real reason.

Mostly though, you are tired because the internet is a vast and unceasing terrian in which you have easily lost months of your life.

For instance, tonight you sacrificed an entire hour to figuring out which Miss America contestant you would be supporting this year. Because you're into intellectual pursuits like that. You decided on Miss Massachusetts based solely on the title of her platform issue; Smart Smiles: Promoting the Importance of Oral Health. And here you were thinking world peace was the only platform worth wearing sparkly, sparkly evening gowns for in a competitive context.

You have my deepest apologies for the lack of sleep.

Regards,
Your Former Self (circa midnight)

P.S. You ran out of coffee yesterday, so you'll actually have to wake up even earlier to get to a cafe and make sure you can be caffeinated enough to last the whole day. I could have fixed this for you by buying more beans today, but I forgot.

Things that would be nifty to temporarily tattoo on your face before you travelled long distances:

2011-12-09T19:42:00.001+11:00

And look where that got them

2011-11-25T21:17:00.001+11:00

"The only reason they say that 'Bill posters will be prosecuted' is because they didn't want to say 'Poster posters will be prosecuted'. They probably thought that phrase would be ceaselessly mocked."

I guess a lot of people had to be hurt before they thought of making this sign

2011-11-22T21:39:00.001+11:00

On the crappy fortune-teller who stopped me in the street

2011-11-17T08:44:00.000+11:00

"Excuse me miss! I am a fortune teller and I have to tell you that you have a very lucky face. Very lucky!"

I stopped myself from compulsively rolling my eyes, having grown ever-used to meeting strange people on my block. And while they make for absurd and whimsical experiences, sometimes they are just an incredible pain in the ass.

"You will have great luck in January 2012. Next year, January. A great fortune."

"Well that's great? But I really have t--"

"You don't believe me? I will show you." He opened up a notebook and took out a loose pink sheet. "I will write on this piece of paper."

I was full of morbid curiosity that this man was about to try and convince me of his great and mystic powers on a main street on the border of Redfern. When he scrunched up his paper and handed it to me to keep in my fist, I half-hoped that this would be a hilarious prediction that I would win fifty grand on a scratchy and blow it all on Happy Meals and booze, or that my immediate future husband would be a failed pirate, relegated to managing a dodgy hostel in Haymarket because his sea-faring ways were made less lucrative by the transition from physical to digital music, as alas! -- he had made his money in old-school music pirating; pillaging the shipping containers of the big four production companies.

He asked my to pick a colour, my favourite. I don't have a favourite colour because I think I stopped caring in primary school, but I always say grey because it is boring and bland and it makes people think you are the kind of person who eats plain oatmeal and celery and is terrified of getting their hair wet in the rain.

Then he asked me to pick a number between one and five. I picked four and he seemed really annoyed that I had. Too bad, dude. Three is the obvious human approximation of randomness, so I would not be going there.

And then he asked me whether I loved my mum or dad more. I was perplexed because it was a wildly personal question and I've never actually been able to separate my mum and dad in my mind. They're like one irritating but loveable unit, designed to haunt my every major life decision until their senility ensures they cannot remember the details of my existence. I tried to explain my lack of preference to him, but he kept insisting that I was closer to one than the other. I picked my mum, mostly so I could get this show on the road, but also because I knew she'd be more upset than my dad if I hadn't picked her. He requested her name.

He wrote all of these down, at first spelling 'gray' in the American way which is more phonetic, but somehow less nuanced; like that Facebook friend who can't spell anything meaningful in the correct way, but you still kind of understand what they are saying.

Then he told me to look at the paper in my hand. I couldn't hear him very well because of the traffic, and I kind of gave him this look like, "Really, now? This is a parlour trick, not fortune-telling."

I opened the damn piece of paper and it had my colour, number and mother's name on it. Grey was spelled in British English. I was mildy amused, but mostly I was pissed off that I'd stopped for the kind of thing I could have seen on Breaking the Magician's Code in the late nineties, when I cared.

He rifled through a leather wallet and pulled out a photocopied letter for me to read. On it were some official looking stamps (which were actually emblems of a generic-sounding company rather than anything official) and a letter of referral from someone whose name I didn't recognise at all, touting the apparent gifts of the yogi in front of me. It's worth noting that the language was exclamatory and overly-formal. Like the kind of letters I write when I drink too much, except these were serious.

He asked me to write down my name, which I deliberately misspelled because I figured he should already know if he was really, really good. Then he pulled out little tabs of paper with people's names and cash amounts (fifty, sixty dollars) written on them, before asking me to write my name and an amount of money. I think he said the words 'bank account' and 'right now' though I'm not sure because of the traffic. In any case it confirmed my suspicions that the guy was a con artist and there would be no tales of failed pirates in my near future. I refused to sign or write anything. He started pressing me for my great family tragedy or secret. Of which my family has none, unless you count my dad's skin condition which he is ignoring at his own peril because he is an idiot.

"What is the biggest problem in your life? You must have one. Why won't you tell me your secret? What are your problems? You can trust me." He leaned into me and I leaned back, in that awkward manoeuvre which I haven't performed since the bad house parties of several years ago.

"I... don't have any problems? Umm... actually, I have to go to a concert. My problem is I really have to pick up a friend so I can go to a concert tonight and you're making me really late."

"A concert?" He seemed disappointed that I hadn't said 'cancer'. "Do you have any time right now? We can sit down somewhere and talk... I can tell you--"

All the alarm bells in my head were ringing. I had no idea if the guy was hitting on me or wanted my money but I was terrified and already late.

"I really have to get to this concert."

He looked at me, knowing that I was unconvinced and there wasn't a trace of shame in his face, as there would have been in mine if I had ever tried to pull shit like this. He asked for the piece of paper still in my hand, and I didn't want to give it up knowing my mother's name was on it. But I had to, of course.

"I think you had a piece of carbon paper under your note book."

I actually didn't, because my piece of paper had different letter strokes, but was obviously written in the same hand. And there was no scribbling out over the American spelling of 'gray'. But I said it anyway, so that he knew I hadn't believed him.

I will probably still buy scratchies in January. Just to spite him.

QC&A

2011-10-10T00:48:00.000+11:00

Tony Jones is the host of Q&A, the live panel show which regularly features politicians and social commentators, among celebrities, authors, academics and the like. Jones is renowned for countering unwieldy audience questions with, "I'll take that as a comment," in order to keep the show to time. It's totally fair, of course; live television is a beast I would dare not tackle in my wildest dreams. But whenever I watch Q&A all I can think about is my imagined life as a retail assistant (I could never actually do retail because you deal with a whole different level of crazy than you do in most other forms of work; I think I prefer being the crazy one in general social interactions) in which Tony Jones and I engage in the following scenario:

TONY: Excuse me, could you tell me whether you have those thongs that are also bottle openers?

ME: Oh my God. You're Tony Jones.

TONY: Yes, I am. Err, so do you stock the botte opener thongs?

ME: I'm sorry Tony; I'll have to take that as a comment not a question.

TONY: Oh, come on woman! You think you're the only one to say that to me? You should hear my wife! I ask her, 'Do we have any dip left in the fridge?' 'I'll take that as a comment Tony.' You people need to find something new!

[Extended pause]

ME: We have normal bottle openers and we have normal thongs... I can glue them together if you like?

A temporary wall in the Australian Museum, circa now:

2011-09-25T23:17:00.001+10:00

I'd love to live in a house with this written on a big, unadorned wall. But I fear that future landlords may not share my sentiments.

Impressive moments in which behavioural research can be applied to your day-to-day life

2011-09-20T22:44:00.000+10:00

Apparently humans are loss averse creatures; we feel the pain of loss more acutely than the joy of the equivalent gain.

This is never more apparent to me than when I am overcharged two dollars at a cafe which undercharged me by exactly two dollars the day before.

Awkward conversation #61294

2011-09-06T22:59:00.000+10:00

"So did you get around to changing your voicemail message?"

"Yes."

"What did you go with?"

"I said I was busy being used as human collateral in the battle between cowboys and aliens."

"Haha... Wait. Really?"

"Uh... Yes?"

"Err... Do you think you could change it to something more business-y?"

"Oh, okay."

Adventures in voicemail greetings

2011-09-04T23:06:00.002+10:00

"Hi. You've reached Celina from [company name redacted]. I can't get to the phone right now because I'm being used as human collateral in the battle between cowboys and aliens. Uh... But if you leave a message I'll try to get back to you as soon as peace has been restored. Cheers."

Why do all the stamps I buy only have flora and fauna on them?

2011-07-26T23:51:00.007+10:00

"She's so stressed out about her application. She was, like, 'What do you think of this stamp? It has a dog on it. Do you think they'll care that it has a dog on it?' And I was like, 'Listen! They don't care about your stamp!'"

[Pause]

"What kind of dog was it?"

"I think it was a poodle."

2011-07-25T18:30:00.004+10:00

textually unattractive (adj.) [tekstʉwəli•ənɐtræktiv]
A description specific to adults who text like tweenage girls (i.e. tYping lyK dis!!), which mitigates all the otherwise appealing qualities they possess. e.g. "Ugh. Look at this SMS. Am I not worth full sentences? This is so textually unattractive; I'll have to break up with him over Skype because I just couldn't bear the ensuing text exchange."

Note: I think there is is a difference between fat fingers/abbreviations/acronyms/typos and actively sounding like an idiot. The latter is not getting you laid in any context of communication, bro.

Note also: This is only barely, loosely, not-even-really based on a real-life event and I would never break up with someone over Skype.

I would tweet that shit, like a real lady.

Neighbourhood #10

2011-07-22T15:53:00.006+10:00

I don't really get this, because Wollongong is not the most cosmopolitan place to live anyway, athough it can be quite lovely. I just like that someone was so impassioned by this sentiment that they wrote it on a doorstep in the dead of night.

Neighbourhood #9

2011-07-21T13:49:00.002+10:00

Goodbye, Mitchell Road Auction House. You have sheltered me over so many restless weekends and I will miss you dearly.

Experiences in accidental vegetarianism

2011-07-20T16:49:00.008+10:00

So the last few weeks in which I thought I might have had some kind of latent depression has turned out to be a spell of mere malnutrition. Inexplicable lethargy, thy name is anaemia!

Today I was so exhausted I called in sick and planned on schlepping around the house playing Words with Friends* and Googling iron-intensive recipes. My mum happened to cotton on to these plans, disapproved and took me out for a red-meat-based lunch and a seaside jaunt.

A coffee instantly made me feel better, and it occurred to me that I've probably been compensating for my iron depletion with caffeine for at least the last few weeks. I considered existing on this kind of substandard diet for a while longer (because coffee is more cost-effective in terms of dollar-to-enjoyment ratios than red meat, at least for me) but then I went to the supermarket and ended up in the cold aisle where I was still so zombified that I stared at a wall of dips for five full minutes without flinching; like I was in a state of pesto-induced cosmic serenity.

Except it was actually fatigue.

It was pretty weird, especially because I didn't even want to buy dip.

*I am a ruined woman because of this game. Although I think, like Facebook, it has diluted the meaning of the word 'friend'. I play with total strangers in, like, Oklahoma and they totally kick my butt, but I cannot resist. It is a distinct illness of its own.

This topic always makes me feel a strange nostalgia for being operated on

2011-07-18T15:56:00.001+10:00

"Being put under general anaesthetic is like being abducted by aliens. That bit where they tell you to count backwards from ten? I always think I'm going to make it to zero, like 'Ha! Your meagre anaesthetic cannot defeat me.' But I conk out at about six. Then, time totally contracts. You wake up a couple of hours later and the nurse is like, 'It's done. Now put your clothes back on.'"

On watching Batman (1989):

2011-07-10T21:49:00.003+10:00

[Jack-Nicholson-as-the-soon-to-be-Joker is suspended over a vat of bubbling green liquid, gripping the hand of Michael-Keaton-as-Bruce-Wayne-as-Batman.]

"Why would you have a giant vat of toxic liquid boiling away with an open top?"

"Convenient storytelling?"

[Michael Keaton loses grip of Jack Nicholson who falls into the disfiguring stew.]

"It's a massive breach of occupational health and safety."

The arts & craft movement has gone too far

2011-07-05T00:42:00.000+10:00

Poodle? Miscoloured lion?

Beer cosy?

2011-07-03T23:26:00.005+10:00

small bar blues n. pl. [smɔl•ba•blu:z]

A state of melancholy reached when realising that you lack the time, money or fortitude to pay respects to all of the interesting small bars which have proliferated in your area/city. e.g. "Oh honey, you know it's true/I gotta drink in my basement/To cure these small bar blues."

I just want to know what kind of person puts a hot iron on a Laminex™ table

2011-07-03T22:20:00.000+10:00

"...WITH BURN MARK"

Things that will happen when you decide to have moscato & gingernut biscuits in lieu of a nutritious dinner:

2011-07-03T21:15:00.009+10:00

You will go to your nearest shopping mall, acquire the necessary goods in an orderly fashion, jump back into your car, approach the boomgate and realise that your ticket is completely gone. You will hold up exiting traffic for a full seven minutes before you hit the help button on the turnstile. The cheerful attendant will tell you that you'll have to buy a new ticket at a cost of $40 even though you've only parked for a total of twenty minutes, including the seven minutes you spent frantically searching for your ticket.
You somehow manage to reverse, park and rifle through your things some more. Finally you leave the car in semi-defeat to buy another ticket. You check your original parking spot, although out of spite rather than hope. There you will find your ticket waiting for you on the ground, right underneath the driver's door where it had fallen out from that stupid console pocket they build on the inside of car doors, even though you couldn't feasibly carry anything in there except parking tickets and scrunched up receipts. You will fight the urge to sink to your knees and weep.
While you are driving back home you notice the car in front of you has written in its back window in marker:

4 SALE
$1900

You will think to yourself, "Wow. It's a shitbox for sure, but if you I drove it around for just a year and sold it for scrap; totally worth it."

Then your future shitbox stalls on the spot and holds up traffic. It becomes your former future shitbox.
At the next set of lights a squeegee man will notice that you are an innocuous, small woman with geeky glasses and a DIY haircut who is playing Bon Iver's new album at volumes usually reserved for Ministry of Sound compilations. He will throw his sudsy water over your window despite your cries declining his services. You will realise that you have no change, and hence refuse to open the window to acknowledge the smug bastard who thinks you are just an innocuous, small woman who can be guilted into giving up the spare change which she don't actually have.
You will arrive back home and start drinking your moscato immediately.
Edited to add: Five nights later you will get out of your car in the same parking lot, only a few spaces over from the original scene of misfortune. You will look down and notice a parking ticket on the ground; right underneath the door of the car next to you, where it has fallen out from that stupid console pocket they build on the inside of car doors. It has been issued only ten minutes before. You place it on the top edge of your neighbouring car in hopes that its owner will notice it when they open their door. You hope that they have a bottle of moscato to come home to.

The MacGyver of our generation is a man renowned for eating animal entrails

2011-06-29T21:16:00.011+10:00

A button detached itself from my coat today just as I was about to leave the house. I sewed it back on using dental floss because it was the only thing thick enough. I felt like Bear Grylls,* if Bear Grylls was overly concerned with preserving his elaborate sartorial references to the 1960s.

*I've always wondered whether Bear Grylls complains about the food in restuarants. I mean, who could take him seriously? I would be all, "Dude, you ate a zebra's eyeball. You have forfeited your right to complain about soggy hamburgers for the rest of time. But... um, it's still a great source of protein?"

What would be really beautiful though, is if he sent back a steak for being too rare.

Or if he was on Masterchef.

the wrong way right

2011-06-27T14:17:00.003+10:00

Can I still get a shirt that says 'I sat the Mensa IQ exam & all I got was this lousy t-shirt'?

2011-06-24T04:07:00.008+10:00

Dear Mensa,

Every couple of years I get the urge to sit your entrance IQ exam.

Maybe I really like the idea of scoring in the top 2% of the population for a test which vaguely approximates intelligence. This would mean I could go to Mensa cocktail parties. See Mensa, I need to know what it is you do there. Do your members down chocotinis and fluffy ducks while discussing their own intelligence? Or do they talk about how they overcame adverse childhoods to become really, really good at building robots that are also vacuum cleaners? Do you play Scrabble or Twister? Maybe you solve the Herald's Friday cryptic crossword just for a bit of a lark. I mean, Friday's cryptic has just crushed my will to form articulate sentences for the last five years, but you probably do it in time trials.

Or I just really want to cement my place in the stupidest 98% of the population.

Love,
Celina

I still get jealous of little kids who wear Spiderman costumes in the street

2011-06-23T23:52:00.002+10:00

I know that there are actual applications for these costumes (hopefully in bizarre but adorable renactments of the Bible rather than dress-up parties). My only problem is that the Jesus costume does not include a full, lush beard as indicated by the packaging. It's just a dress with some red fabric pinned over the shoulder. How can we live in a world in which a child's Jesus costume does not include a beard?

I learned how to spell 'anxiety' in kindergarten because I was reading pamphlets on mental illnesses. This is why children should have books.

2011-06-23T21:36:00.001+10:00

J: "You know how cane toads sound really... throaty. I mean not throaty, but --"

Me: "Guttural."

J: "Yes! Guttural! They sound guttural."

C: "I like how Celina knew the precise word to describe the [croak of the] cane toad. She's like our encyclopedia, for words."

Me: "You mean a thesaurus?"

C: "Yeah, that thing. A thesaurus."

wandering around haberdashery stores in the absence of things to do

2011-06-22T03:04:00.002+10:00

There might be a more elegant way of phrasing this,
but I could not come up with it.

reaching for same words in a different place

2011-06-20T16:53:00.008+10:00

All humour has an indelible darkness.

I actually love this city & the way that everyone who lives here always loves Melbourne more

2011-06-19T01:05:00.011+10:00

The UTS Centre for Writing and the NSW Government is in want of a poet to wax lyrical about the Sydney, for a year. An official Sydney City Poet is definitely an interesting idea, and one I'd entertained submitting myself towards if it weren't for fact that they seem to be jonesing for an actual poet who is an adequate public speaker with a basic facility for social situations in which you have to talk to real-life people. As opposed to the girl who once tweeted, under the #haiku hashtag:

fake tans of neon
like oompa loompas set free
oh, sydney summers!*

It's a shame that they want a sociable and reasonably talented person for the role. I'd love to tell people I was The City Poet in addition to all the nebulous things I seem to 'be' at the moment. I had a conversation with someone last night that went like this:

"I'm studying but I'm doing a bit of freelance writing, math tutoring, finishing off an editing project and I do some subbing for a non-profit. I'd love to get into copywriting or something similar.**"

"Oh, I have a copyright exam coming up. It's easy but! I don't even have to study for it."

I couldn't bother explaining the difference between copywriting and copyrights to an aspiring lawyer, and let them think that I actually want to write creative content disclaimers or something. Which isn't to denigrate copyright protections, but they are freely available to un-ironically copy from the Creative Commons website and probably don't need any embellishment under my hand.

But I tried anyway:

UNLESS STATED OTHERWISE ALL CONTENT FOUND ON THIS BLOG IS THE PROPERTY OF THE AUTHOR, WHOSE NAME IS CELINA IN CASE YOU DIDN'T NOTICE IT AT THE END OF HER LETTERS TO ABSTRACT CONCEPTS, OR IN THE SIDE-BAR, OR AT THE END OF EVERY ENTRY FOR THAT MATTER. SHE CLEARLY LOVES THE SOUND OF HER OWN NAME. HAHAHA. EXTERNAL USE OF WORDS OR IMAGES BELONGING TO THE AUTHOR (CELINA, JUST IN CASE YOU FORGOT) MUST BE AGREED TO BETWEEN THE LICENSEE (I.E. YOU, BECAUSE WHY ELSE WOULD YOU BE READING THIS BORING CRAP?) AND THE AUTHOR (I.E. CELINA). ANY UNAUTHORISED USE OF CONTENT IS A BREACH OF COPYRIGHT UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW AND WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION, PREFERABLY INITIATED BY LAW & ORDER'S OMINOUS SCENE-CHANGE SOUND. YOU KNOW THE ONE. IF YOU DO NOT POSSESS THE FINANCES OR THE ENDLESS SUPPLY OF DELECTABLE PASTRIES WITH WHICH TO REIMBURSE THE AUTHOR FOR THE EMOTIONAL TURMOIL YOU HAVE INFLICTED, YOU MUST INSTEAD FORFEIT YOUR DIGNITY. WHILE DIGNITY IS AN INTANGIBLE OBJECT, IT CAN BE MADE TANGIBLE AND DESTROYED VIA ELABORATE DISPLAYS OF PUBLIC HUMILIATION. THINK ABOUT THAT, YOU DIRTY SCUMBAG ABOUT TO STEAL THE AUTHOR'S CONTENT. IN VIEWING THIS BLOG YOU HAVE AGREED TO ACCEPT THE TERMS OF THIS DISCLAIMER. YOU ARE TOTALLY SCREWED MAN.***

In short, I should not be the City Poet. Or a copyright writer. Or a copywriter for that matter.

Unless it was for a fake tan company.

*I tried to think of one for autumn but failed miserably as it was based mostly on the image of people wearing thongs with coats, which I swear happened for a while in 2005 but seems to have fallen out of favour as Sydney has gradually raised its sartorial baseline (or lowered its temperature tolerance). My winter haiku would mostly be a bitch about the recent torrential rain and my spontaneous decision to cut my own fringe (again) in a week where straightened hair was destined to re-wavify.

**I neglected to mention then about being up for this exact position last week for a really fun company with a ping-pong table in their office. The appropriate levels of management seemed to be mad for the way I wrote -- which always surprises me in a bad way, like I think they're just taking the piss or they'll find out what a fraud I am -- but they're taking their sweet time getting back to me. It made me think they just wanted to meet the kind of person who writes obtuse and sarcastic cover letters, just so they can tell this person about the ping-pong table on which they will never get to play ping-pong. This seems cruel, but I suppose I can't blame since I want to crash an interview next week with a guy whose cover letter and CV used the word 'achieves' in place of 'achievements' -- repeatedly. My sole purpose will be to try and make him use the word 'achieves' out loud, in the wrong context. Sometimes I feel like I live in an extended episode of Seinfeld.

***Apparently disclaimers are often written in all-caps (or ALL-CAPS, as I am tempted to type) to make them more conspicuous, so you don't unknowingly agree to anything you didn't intend to. Even though this forms the main body of text and could have easily been done in lowercase, it was important for me to be as authentic as possible in my first foray as a copyright writer. I think they're traditionally known as 'contract lawyers' but I don't have the means to get a law degree. I could always be the Dr. Phil of copyright writing, or something equally as flattering.

Admittedly there are much broader ramifications of this hypothetical event, but they would not have meant as much to me today

2011-06-18T19:38:00.002+10:00

Dear Spain circa the Age of Exploration,

How did you not find -- and subsequently colonise -- this country? Australia is a touch smaller than the USA, but we've got about 25,000 kilometres of coastline. That is a damn impressive amount of coastline which you could have hit, just so you know. Like, you could have hit it anytime before the Brits did.

Had you done so you would have been the cultural DNA of this nation. Consequently, I would be able to find dulce de leche in this damned country, instead of boiling cans of sweetened condensed milk and risking the loss of my eyesight via exploding cans of aluminium in the noble pursuit of thick velvety caramel. Think about that, Spain circa the Age of Exploration. Your neglect has jeopardised the delicate corneas of young women in Australia.

But more importantly, you insensitive cad, I would be able to take siestas with legitimate reason. Okay sure, it's winter and the current climate may not actually be responsible for my propensity to crawl into bed in the early afternoon with the cryptic crossword squashed beneath my pillow -- but sometimes you've had a particularly long morning-after-the-night-before and you just need to sleep damn it! Extra espresso shots and drip brew coffee, while fantastic tools, are not adequate substitutes for slumber. So I want, nay, need a cultural framework to prevent me from feeling guilty when I wake up in the late dusk, unable to shake off the sense that I should have been more productive.

SctAoE (do you mind if I call you that?), you had until 1788 to stick your little flag in this earth, proclaim it as your own and embed the siesta ritual into the Australian culture. Was that really so much to ask for?

Sincerely,
Celina

When I say 'You' what I really mean is 'I & others with freakishly parallel experiences'

2011-06-13T23:31:00.012+10:00

Things you may have realised over the long weekend:

You have no idea how old the Queen is.
It is not actually her birthday.
The one time in recent memory that you try to organise a social event people will:
- Have fights with their significant others
- Go camping
- Become dissuaded by the deluge and cold
- Forget entirely.
It is a refreshing role-reversal to have a bartender call after you and your friend, "But... will I ever see you again?"*
While taking kooky photos in Kmart you will feel obliged to buy three pairs of tights and a cutlery holder in order to seem like an regular, well-adjusted customer.
You do not know how rude it is to put your handbag on the table while you're talking to a person, but you do it all the time.
Maybe you should stop putting your handbag on the table when you're talking to a person.
It is possible to spend a whole day doing absolutely nothing; to make absolutely no contribution to the world, no creative ideas, no human interaction, no semblance of consequence from any of the things you do. This can be achieved through a rigorous combination of sleeping, eating leftover pizza and meandering across the internet with no purpose.
A single large banana now costs $2.48 ($12.98 a kilo). When you bake it in your craisin peanut butter muesli honey banana cookies, you won't actually be able to taste it.

*I hope to ask this question if I'm ever kicked out of any establishment, such as the museum or Kmart. Especially if it coincides with any dragging, kicking and screaming; my favourite kind of Being Kicked Out.

That's okay, I usually start drinking at 8am

2011-06-12T11:31:00.002+10:00

What is the definition of 'sunset'? The moment when the sun makes contact with the horizon? When it disappears entirely from the sky? When the centre of the sun hits the skyline?

This sign elicits more questions than answers.

Its foremost question seems to be "Will you please stick beer labels all over me?"

Neighbourhood #8

2011-06-09T07:58:00.001+10:00

'SHARED PATH'
Corner of Elizabeth & Redfern Street

Neighbourhood #7

2011-06-08T22:10:00.007+10:00

My crappy photo doesn't capture how glorious it is to be walking home on an Arctic night & find a woman singing 'Walk On By' in a gallery window

Space food sticks? Are they organic?

2011-06-06T00:37:00.010+10:00

In the inner city it's considered sacrilege to drink Starbucks. The words "dirty dishwater" are often bandied about in this context, among Satan's bodily fluids and so forth. I've never actually tried anything from there because I've always lived close to nice cafes. I haven't actively avoided it, but only because I haven't ever had to.

But sometimes... Sometimes I really want to try it. Just so I can tell people about that one time I had Starbucks and it tasted the way the inside of my vacuum cleaner smells, except with nuances of cigarette and brussel sprout, and Oh my God, I can't believe I didn't die right there on the spot.

I'm pretty sure this is how people in the inner west actually speak about their Starbucks experiences, as though it's akin to trekking through the Amazon rainforest for a month with only a butter knife and a packet of space food sticks.

Oh, the hazards of dialogue!

2011-06-03T11:42:00.002+10:00

You know that feeling you get after you've just sent an e-mail with a self-aggrandising proclamation about what a pedant you are for grammar and punctuation, but then you remember that you've embedded a quote incorrectly by unnecessarily inserting commas?

No? Me neither.

This is what happens when you forget to teach a generation of children about grammar & they go on to be graphic designers:

2011-05-25T01:10:00.005+10:00

After I took this photo I vowed never to buy anything from this store again (for similar reasons I'm not able to buy anything from Bakers Delight). The very next week I ended up purchasing an over-priced polyester blouse here, because I desperately needed a top that made me look like a functioning member of civilised society. I guess all moral codes can be compromised.

I always thought 'suffering for your art' meant whiskey & questionable men, but for me it meant being suspended over Darling Harbour with a tourist family for a full ten minutes

2011-05-22T13:38:00.001+10:00

Last week I did what no native Sydney-sider ever does:
I rode the monorail. Eight times.

Sorry Mr. Schuman, I still hope one day your girlfriend will photograph me

2011-05-19T00:03:00.003+10:00

A girl stopped me in the park yesterday and asked if she could take my photo, because she liked my hat. First I cursed myself for wearing an eccentric outfit without any make up. Then I wanted to tell her my hat was just a cheap chain store substitute for the hat I really, really wanted* and couldn't she see that the crown was too deep to be an admirable hat?

Instead I said, "Sure."

She stood me in the dying light of the day, dipped her face behind her camera to focus the lens. Snap. We wished each other a lovely evening and turned our heels in opposite directions.

It was flattering, like being photographed by The Sartorialist -- but sweeter, because I always imagine Scott Schuman to be a little bit arrogant in real life. This girl was endearingly soft-spoken, all granny glasses and a vaguely Scandanavian accent. But the incident was eerie too; her camera was an analog Pentax and when we walked away I suddenly understood that belief about cameras stealing your soul. (Not that I have much of a soul left to steal.) It was discomforting to think that a total stranger would have a facsimilie of my face in their private possession; not even in some dilutable, digital form but in that concrete, sentimental way.

Still, I hope I didn't blink.

* The hat of my dreams is a vintage Stetson; a black wool, velvet banded, wide-brimmed fedora, right now sitting on a shelf in Mitchell Road's Antique Markets. I go in nearly every week to try it on and try to justify another hat in my life, but generally poor girls are incompatible with sixty-five dollar hats. Yeah, sixty-five dollars. I sold my soul for half that amount.

An irrational (but effective) reason to save money:

2011-05-17T11:29:00.001+10:00

Spell-checker just advised me to change 'homophonic' to 'homophobic' & I wish I had something witty to say about it

2011-05-15T16:52:00.006+10:00

I saw this piece of graffiti a block from my house that said:

SHELLYS A MOLE

And my thoughts were, in this order:

YOU NEED AN APOSTROPHE.
THE TRADITIONAL SPELLING IS 'MOLL'.
YOU MAKE ME [SIC].

...

OH MY GOD.
I JUST USED A HOMOPHONIC PUN INSIDE MY OWN HEAD.
JUST LIKE A CRAZY PERSON.

Writing anything filled with double entendres always makes me nervous because I wonder what my mum will think if she reads it. Although, for the most part I think she'd approve.

2011-05-09T00:36:00.005+10:00

Dear Sleep,

I don't know why you've been avoiding me. Is it something I've done? Sure, I may have dalliances with caffeine, even in the late afternoon when I could be taking a siesta with you, but I always, always come back to you.

We've had plenty of good times together, mostly in my bed. But sometimes on my couch. And then there was that time we met in the computer labs at uni at 3AM after I finished that heinous assignment. I crept under the desks, placed my bag under my head and closed my eyes -- before a girl burst through the door and almost caught us in the act. Oh man, that was crazy.

Remember all those lectures we'd spend together? Mostly after I'd refused you the night before? That's what I love about you Sleep, you're so forgiving. My friends and family can tell when you haven't been around, that's the kind of effect you have on me. You know that I'm a wretched excuse for a woman without you.

I love you. Come back to me.

Sincerely,
Celina

fourteen promises & a crooked skyline

2011-05-04T12:16:00.024+10:00

This hill is one of those places that are only really beautiful at particular times of the day. Its temporal sweet spot is during dusk, when every person and their dog/bike/pram/skateboard is silhouetted against the wide, glowing sky. Earlier this year I happened to see a teenage couple flying a kite and soundlessly dancing along the footpath here; it was one of the most cinematic things I'd ever seen in real life.

By contrast, one long-gone languid summer I'd walk here almost everyday; always at various hours, and almost always underwhelmed by the view. I even crawled up here horrifically early to watch the sun rise, and it was the least inspiring sunrise I had ever seen; brittle and bright like a hangover.

Where exactly does the billboard end and the irony begin?

2011-05-02T22:06:00.001+10:00

Cronulla Station, 2008

I don't know where the misplaced 'A' comes from.

'You Should Really Read This Book'

2011-05-02T01:11:00.031+10:00

Résumés and cover letters are exactly like books, they are the covers by which we ask to be judged. The cover letter is a blurb, the list of author's other works is your employment history, and quotes from literary reviews are your references. All these elements collude to have a reader take interest in your pages and read it. Or at the very least, to not fling it across the room and scream, "You'll never work in this town again!" when they're done with it.

I would love to send job applications in a book format, with a cheesy black and white portrait in the sleeve. I would do my hair exactly like Joan Collins, wear jewels the size of my gall bladder* and liberally abuse the soft-focus lens. Because then people will take me seriously.

My grab quotes would sound exactly like the following:

"Celina has squandered her writing abilities on truly questionable subject matters that, frankly, wouldn't be fit to publish in mX."
--Ms. Crawford, my high school English teacher
"Her editing made me fear for my sanity. She insisted on doing it in hard copy because she's allergic to computers or something... Once she suggested that the word 'prominent', as in "the prominent surrealist painter Salvador Dali...", might imply that Dali was still alive because it's only ever used in the context of living people... Who the hell doesn't know that Dali is dead?"
--D.C., an editing client
"Celina's greatest talent is being able to tell the Olsen twins apart. Oh, and she deliberately cooks too much for dinner so she can have leftovers for lunch the next day. She's good at lots of things."
--My mum
"She keeps editing our job ads, even after we've posted them. It's so obnoxious. I think she even edited the ad for her own position after she'd already gotten it. But once she sent me an e-mail where she missed an apostrophe and misspelled a word; I laughed like a hyena. For an hour."
--Hamish, witness to my sub-editing
"She speaks like a drunk scholar trapped in 1995's hit comedy, Clueless. I had to study that film for the HSC you know. And she keeps rehashing my anecdotes and conversations on her blog because she doesn't have a life of her own. Does that sound like a person with 'excellent communication skills' to you?"
--My brother
"Who exactly is this woman?"
--Noam Chomsky, eminent linguist and intellectual
"Celina?! Oh, the whole time I thought her name was Céline."
--A guy I went on a date with once... and only once
"I'm pretty sure I have an AVO issued against her... Tell her to stop sending me love letters, please. They're incomprehensible. And I'm Scottish! I'm supposed to be fluent in incomprehensibility."
--Craig Ferguson, talk show host
"She was always alliterating things. I really regretted sending her to that expensive bar with all the complimentary food and drinks, because her subsequent write-up was basically a three hundred word tongue-twister."
--My former editor
"Celina is awesome in every aspect! Except she's always poor. Can you just hire her? I'm really sick of her not having petrol in her car."
--My best friend
"She always made a concerted effort to use the subjunctive mood, even though it's pretty much obsolete now. There were a lot of aspects in her work, and conduct, which should've been made obsolete too."
--Any of my university tutors
"Listen; my kid, she's a good kid. Well, she burnt the kitchen countertop while she was cooking some pasta when she was fourteen. I'll never let her forget that. Never. Other than that she's a good kid."
--My dad
"Look lady, we're not going to give you a reference for fire-fighting if you've never fought a damn fire before. Please stop calling this number."
--NSW Fire and Rescue

*I actually Google-Imaged 'gall bladder' to make sure that gall bladders weren't actually really, really small and that the reference was as appropriate as a hyperbolic reference about your bladder can be. I always regret Googling internal organs.

Anzac Day, 2011, Or: Reason #421 Why I Didn't Stand a Chance at Being a Normal Person

2011-04-26T10:13:00.003+10:00

"Stop it! That's the second time you've spilled my wine."

"Dad, I can't not turn corners! And car cup-holders aren't designed for wine glasses anyway."

Neighbourhood #6

2011-04-20T17:59:00.002+10:00

forgetting

2011-04-04T11:33:00.001+10:00

Coogee. I just thought there was something funny & overly dramatic about the way the figure in this sign is flailing his arms around. Also, I empathise with him for having arms that are too long for his body.

I'll probably look exactly like this if I ever drop off a cliff.

La Perouse. Broken bottles on the rocks; a welcome respite from all the seascapes & sunsets I'm constantly snapping there.

Neighbourhood #5

2011-03-22T22:39:00.004+11:00

I've been walking beneath this (long-defunct) restaurant's sign for years and years now,
but it was only last month I realised that it contained a misspelled word.

Now it's the only thing I notice.

The most baffling part of this is the cabbages

2011-03-21T22:38:00.000+11:00

I just started thinking about this photo now. I took it in Pattaya while we were driving through a labyrinth of roads, each leading off to another tourist trap. Apparently Birds & Bees is a resort while Cabbages & Condoms is a restaurant. I really regret not eating there.

It's because I say things like they're being italicised

2011-03-17T23:22:00.002+11:00

"Man, what happened to your thumb?"

"He cut it off for a girl."

"You make it sound like I chopped it off and mailed it to her! All I did was cook her dinner and cut myself. What do I look like? The van Gogh of cooking?"

[Pause]

"It's better the way I tell it."

all the increments added up to be the sum of your absence

2011-03-17T22:45:00.001+11:00

Well, they are a minority group

2011-03-09T02:01:00.020+11:00

"Because of Facebook, your generation will probably be the last with the ability to cheat on their girlfriends with their wives."

Facebook fuses together all the different iterations of our existence, forcing disparate facets of our personalities to converge. Suddenly the barriers dissolve between your workmates, mother, close friends and that guy you met at a party once. Are you exactly the same person in all your social circles? I doubt that anyone could or should be.

I'd always seen this simplifying of personality as a negative thing, because the spectrum of personas we assume in our day-to-day lives is just so wildly interesting.* But after having a conversation with a friend who had known of two men, each secretly maintaining simultaneous long-term relationships (one of whom fathered two sets of children within a fortnight of each other), I'm not so sure. Many words have been written about the way Facebook has shaped our social interactions and integrated itself into a generation who probably can't fathom a life without it, but rarely do we think about its implications for aspiring polygamists (or really, anyone who leads a double life).

*This is why catching teachers on their smoke breaks felt like a little victory in primary school, or why seeing a Z-list tabloid star in real life is really dislocating and strange** -- because you're suddenly faced with their human-ness and ability to express and emote and articulate. In general tabloid stars are to be mocked and denigrated while secretly appreciated for their obscure relevance to human culture.

**I very briefly passed Isabel Lucas from Home and Away (and now Transformers) in a Newtown cafe years ago. I'd hated her eyebrows at the time (they were very black, while her hair was very blond) despite having only seen her in ads. She was incredibly striking in real life. In fact, I first glanced at her because her face was so unusual but attractive, not because I'd actually recognised her. The fact that she was wearing a coat was particularly weird, only because everyone on Home and Away wears board shorts and sundresses all year round, and it amplified the uncanniness of recognising her in an unexpected context. I also saw Erin McNaught, former Miss Universe contestant and current socialite/media personality, at a lad's magazine party last year. She was so much prettier in the flesh***, but she was also very dressed-up with immaculate hair and make-up, so that feeling of dislocation wasn't as apparent as it was with Lucas. I suppose ordinariness is the the most compelling contrast to celebrity.

***This made me wonder why she's considered a model, since models should probably be more photogenic**** than anything else?

****As opposed to 'fleshogenic'. I cling to the belief that I am fleshogenic.

Neighbourhood #4

2011-03-08T23:40:00.001+11:00

Jesus or Julian?

2011-03-08T00:26:00.004+11:00

Let's play a game! I give you:

Source: A still from the movie 'Dogma'

Jesus Christ; carpenter, prophet, Son of God and the global face of Doritos™ and toast...

Source: blog.unitedwetab.com

...and Julian Casablancas; monotone marvel, frontman of The Strokes, solo artist and former alcoholic.

Which of these JCs uttered the following lines:

1. "Will you become what other people think of you?"

2. "Because being quiet can be more powerful than being right."

3. "Your faith has got to be greater than your fear."

(Answers can be highlighted at the end of this post.)

Answers: All are Julian Casablancas

Proverbs for twentysomethings

2011-03-06T21:50:00.005+11:00

Sometimes life gives you lemons and you make lemonade, even though you really hate it.

Later you pour the lemonade down the sink and buy yourself an amaretto sours during the two-for-one cocktail hour at your favourite bar and you say to yourself, Life could be worse; I could be drinking lemonade. Then you clamber back home at some ungodly hour singing Bruce Springsteen songs to yourself; blissfully tipsy and glad that life gave you lemons in the first place.

Does he smell like a wino sometimes?

2011-03-04T18:09:00.004+11:00

Someone needs to make a personalise-able version of Guess Who? (that flip board game where you ask questions about the features of a character until you figure out who they are through a process of elimination). In it you will insert the faces of people you actually know, then play with a mutual friend. Instead of asking about physical characteristics you could ask:

Does he have an overinflated sense of entitlement?
Does she snort when she laughs?
Did I drunkenly dance with your person at that house party that one time and accidentally elbow them in the face?
Does she have an unhealthy attachment to polyester jumpsuits?

It will be far more interactive and thought-provoking than regular Guess Who?, and allows for passive-aggressive gossip in a legitimate context.

(My life calling is probably to write a screenplay based on the fictional personalities of the Guess Who? characters. My screenplay will be exponentially successful, and hipster costume parties will be held across all industrialised nations based solely on the cult-ish affection for 'that redhead with the pillarbox hat' and other winsome characters.)

Two things that should be enshrined in law:

2011-03-03T00:23:00.006+11:00

Annual name tag day in which all citizens must have their full name visible on their person. A 24-hour window for you to finally find out the name of that waitress you always make small talk with, hitherto known as 'what's-her-name' or 'friendly waitress'.
Mandatory novelty horns for road-ragers. Think about how delightful it would be for 'The Chicken Dance' to burst forth from a car as the driver simultaneously flips you off. Yeah, he sure showed me.

Neighbourhood #3

2011-02-22T22:24:00.002+11:00

Welcome to Redfern:
Gateway to Waterloo

Keep taking your medication
OUR OLYMPIC VISITORS MUST SUSPECT NOTHING

I do this thing where I purge my memory of truly embarrassing incidents. It's just like having no shame.

2011-02-22T01:55:00.003+11:00

So the slightly embarrasing thing I actually did last week? Almost high-fived* a friend as he was about to hug and kiss me on the cheek. I came so close to slapping him across the face that we both started slightly. He laughed. We hugged. And high-fived. So the best possible outcome was achieved.

It's very likely that deep down inside I am a fourteen year old boy.

*Apparently, this is my new way of saying goodbye; sort of like that week where I'd say Hola bitches! in my head whenever I greeted someone. Thankfully I never uttered this out loud -- except maybe once when I was tipsy, but I operate under the assumption that everything I do while tipsy is delightfully charming, so it doesn't count.

Neighbourhood #2

2011-02-21T23:40:00.001+11:00

"Dude, save it for a bonfire. It's way more appropriate."

2011-02-21T16:28:00.053+11:00

At first I thought he was wrapping something with copious amounts of cellophane, which was pretty unusual though not noteworthy at all. But the sound went on for a minute or two without faltering, and it was hard to believe it was anything except a crackling fire or hot oil. I knocked on my brother's door.

"Uh... Yes?"
"Are you... cooking something in there?"
[Painfully long silence]
"No."
"Oh... Okay then."

I turned back down the hall as the crackling and spitting continued; in my head I was sure that he was deep-frying food in his room and for some reason this didn't perturb me.

Two minutes later his door burst open and he threw himself out with a look of panic on his face, quickly shutting the door behind him. He turned abruptly and saw me staring at him, total curiosity and apprehension on my face. We looked at each other for about ten full seconds. He smiled tightly as if to say, Everything is just peachy keen, sis. Nothing to see here.

Finally he relented, threw open his door and said, "Umm... I could use a little help." An orange glow danced in the reflection of his glasses.

"Is that a fire in your room?"
"It is", he said in a sing-song intonation while rushing past me.
I looked into his room and a ball of fire was leaping up from the large glass-contained candle on his desk.

"Oh, God. What did you do?"
"I burned some paper in my candle and the whole thing burst into flames", he explained carrying a dog's bowl filled with water back into his room.

While grabbing a bucket, I cursed under my breath. On my way back down the hall I heard the soft hissing of extinguished flames. I peered in. Blackened glass was on the floor, water and wax was splattered around his desk. The glass container was layered with a bubbling black liquid, with the white wax sitting below. The metal dog's bowl was flipped over on top of it.

"I thought the worst that would happen was the paper would get burned up!"
"Did you burn paper with ink on it? Ink has chemicals in it you know. And books have treated paper."
"Yeah. It was from a book."
"How many pages did you burn exactly?"

"Just one... Or two."
[Pause]
"You know, I have read books that I've hated before... I never tried to burn them. In my room."
"Well, I really, really hated this book! This guy at Central gave it to me, making it sound like it was free -- then asked me to pay for it! I asked him if it was religious, and he said it was about religion but wasn't, you know, propoganda. Which I wouldn't have minded. But I opened it up and the first page says to visit www.jesuschristians.com. So I burned it."

Please proofread that schit

2011-02-17T23:43:00.015+11:00

Generally, I cannot like a menu with excessive and obvious typos. A menu should be an overture to a meal; the best ones are creative, descriptive and pedantic if they are to make a real play for your psyche and appetite. When I have to sit at a table and wonder how difficult it could possibly be to access a spell-checker in this day and age, then I am not thinking about your food.

However, this is so hilariously unfortunate that it's hard to hate. I will probably end up eating here several times. On each occasion I will ask the waitstaff, Which schitzel do you recommend?

I will pretend not to hear when they correct me.

Is there a gene that predisposes you to initiating socially awkward conversations?

2011-02-16T21:16:00.004+11:00

A conversation related to me by my brother:

DUDE MY BROTHER IS VAGUELY ACQUAINTED WITH: So who were you talking with on the phone just then?

BROTHER: Just my girlfriend.

DUDE: Oh. You didn't seem like the kind of guy who had a girlfriend.

[A few hours later]

BROTHER: So, you know earlier when you said I didn't seem like the kind of girl who had a girlfriend? What exactly did you mean by that?

DUDE: Ah... shit.

Neighbourhood #1

2011-02-15T18:43:00.001+11:00

From Alexandria to Chippendale, by way of Redfern.

That's just the kind of future-ex-fiancée I am

2011-02-15T17:45:00.011+11:00

Is there a good way to turn down a marriage proposal? It's occurred to me that it doesn't happen too often these days since marriage proposals now seem to be the product of long consultation and discussion beforehand; so the proposer is likely to know beforehand that the proposee will say yes. It's a much more accomodating dynamic, even if it comes at the cost of surprise, but it has the added bonus of possibly eliminating that weird practice of men having to ask their potential-fiancee's father for her hand in marriage (I know some people think this is gallant but it's creepy to believe a grown woman is the property of her father). This is how I think a rejected proposal would probably turn out:

"Christine, will you marry me?"

"Oh... Umm... Maybe later?"

"Well, of course later. It's not like I booked out the registry for this afternoon."

"Ha. Yeah. I mean... maybe you should ask me later."

"Like when? In ten minutes? Six months? We've been dating for five years now! What? You don't want to marry me?"

"I'm just not ready to do this."

"But I made us climb to the top of this mountain so I could propose!"

"You told me we were having a picnic!"

"Well we were; after you were going to say yes."

"You make me climb a giant fucking mountain and then refuse to feed me because I won't marry you!?"

"So you don't want to marry me??"

"No... NO! I don't want to marry you. Did we talk about this? Like, ever? I don't even like weddings!?! I can't believe you don't know that by now. I do not want to get married!"

"Let's just get off this crappy moutain."

[Pause, of the pregnant variety]

"It's going to take an hour to climb back down. Can we at least eat first?"

Although, if a guy did the unthinkable and proposed to me in front of friends and family -- hell, even a large enough group of strangers -- I would probably say yes from the sheer pressure and scrutiny. I'd pick a fight with him later over something really stupid, like whether iodised salt tastes different to regular salt, then I'd break off our engagement with spur-of-the-moment gusto, make up with him, and hope that we could continue dating in a de facto fashion.

I am a romantic.

the best mistakes are the ones i'm making

2011-02-10T22:27:00.001+11:00

Basically, I couldn't centre an image

2011-02-09T22:49:00.004+11:00

Dear Joomla!

I hate you. I hate you and your insipid little exclamation mark which implies that you are fun and easygoing and full of promise. You are none of these things. You are a pimple on the face of content management systems. If you would let me coax you with my meagre knowledge of HTML then maybe we could get along; we could frolic in a field and indent bulleted lists in a timely manner. We could live in a world of harmonised text and image; in an idyllic piece of web-estate to which we have both contributed our worldly talents. This is the future you have forsaken Joomla! For this you have my eternal disdain.

Sincerely,
Celina!

you left for far-flung shores & i went on a date with a sociopath

2011-02-06T17:38:00.004+11:00

This is the third post running in which I make elaborate reference to mass-marketed junk food and it makes me feel dirty

2011-02-01T12:44:00.009+11:00

"If you were an M&M, what kind would you be?"

"A blue one."

"Chocolate or peanut?"

"Neither. Crispy."

"Okay. There are no incorrect answers -- but that sir, is the correct answer."

Golliwogs of the Age of Obesity

2011-01-31T13:26:00.025+11:00

(Source: www.sanza.co.uk)

Today during my regular jaunt down the biscuit aisle of my local supermarket I noticed that TeeVee Snacks were on special ($2.79, including the Malt flavour).

TeeVee Snacks are an anachronism of junk food marketing. In the current age, where inactivity and processed food are our great social ills, these would never be concieved of -- let alone marketed and sold across across the nation.

[A boardroom deep in the bowels of Arnott's Headquarters. Several men sit at the board table, all wearing grey or navy suits and tacky brightly-coloured ties which are supposed to hint at their latent whimsy and eccentric personalities]

"Okay team. Today we're going to start a revolution. We're going to innovate. We need a biscuit that will change the way we snack."

"What do you mean?"

"How can we design a biscuit that allows -- neigh, demands! --that people snack mindlessly and extensively?"

"Well, our biscuit should be small so that they're easy to grasp by the handful and lose track of how many you've eaten."

"They should also have the illusion of being irresistable, say by being coated in mediocre chocolate."

"And they should be lightweight yet crunchy, to fool people into thinking they're eating something more substantial. That way it's possible to inhale a whole box without thinking."

"Yes! Yes! That's it! I love it. Mediocre chocolate! But we need more. We need context. How can we contextualise our tiny, seemingly delicious chocolate-coated biscuits? We need to put the snacker in a situation that amplifies their snacking experience."

"Well, not in the office, because people need to use telephones or write reports and the use of basic motor skills interferes with the snack-per-minute ratio. The RTA probably wouldn't like us marketing Car Snacks for the same reason."

"Don't we know someone high up in their ranks?"

"No, Jeff; we don't. We never could infiltrate the RTA."

"Damn... Well how about this? Television."

[Brief pause laced with admiration from all]

"Gentlemen, I think we're on to something."

"Kids, mothers, fathers, drunks, recently divorced 40-somethings; they all watch television! It is the bonfire of the modern age, before which we gather our friends and family -- or alternatively our overwhelming self-pity and loneliness -- to bathe in the audio-visual chaos of other people's lives. It's where we lose all sense of time and consequently, we eat without thinking."

"I once ate a whole roast chicken in front of the television with my bare hands."

[Stunned silence]

"Did that include the stuffing?"

"Yeah. Carbs make a meal my man! Atkins and The Zone can claw the stuffing out of my cold, dead hands."

"What were you watching?"

"You know that movie where Arnold Schwazeneger gets pregnant and Danny Devito disguises him as a steroid-abusing woman?"

"I love that movie!"

"Really? I preferred Kingergarten Cop."

"That was pretty good too. It's amazing Arnie had a career beyond Terminator. He turned out to be a really versatile actor--"

"--Listen, let's run with this TV idea. I want to get lunch."

"What about the perception that television and junk food promote inactivity and consequently, obesity? Especially for children who don't know any better and will undoubtedly be our key demographic?"

"What!? Mark, this is 1996. In this day and age kids are forced into Physical Education classes, even though it's known that their physical co-ordination is still developing. Some of them will never catch a ball until they turn seventeen! Children lead varied and active lives beyond their television sets! What are they going to do, go on the internet? My daughter went on a Spice Girls fansite last week, it was filled with grainy pictures and took 8 minutes to load! She went outside to chase a cat while I waited for the soles of their vertiginous platform shoes to appear. The livelihoods of children could never be pinned on us. We are just the arbiters of choice; we give people options in their snacking lives. We enrich the experience of not being active."

"Yeah, you're right. What was I thinking?"

the haphazard sleeper's guide to dreaming

2011-01-30T00:04:00.007+11:00

I was hoping they'd tell me these were limited edition cookies

2011-01-29T01:54:00.008+11:00

Hello,

I've just purchased a packet of Oreos from the Coles Sydney CBD store in which all the Oreos were assembled incorrectly. Instead of having the etched Oreo design on the outside of the cookie, one side of each cookie is facing inwards towards the cream. The numbers/letters printed on the side of the box are: 29082011EB. Even though I remain satisfied with the taste of the Oreos, I thought you should know about this.

Sincerely,

Celina *******

Dear Ms *******,

Thank you for contacting Kraft Foods via our website regarding your Oreo Biscuit purchase.

We were sorry to read of your disappointing experience with our product and would like to collect further details from you to allow our Quality Control department to further investigate the product issue you have described.

If possible could you please provide us with the barcode from the pack and we will arrange for a reimbursement voucher to be forwarded to your mailing address to try and make up for some of your disappointment.

We thank you for taking the time to notify us of this product issue and if you require any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact the Kraft Advisory Service on freecall 1800 033 275.

Yours faithfully

KRAFT FOODS AUSTRALIA

between the interludes

2011-01-27T22:59:00.011+11:00

The easiest thing is to not have children or to breed with someone who has a really big nose too

2011-01-27T00:24:00.012+11:00

"Okay, so let's say you had a really big nose and you hated it so much that you went and got a nose job and then you had a kid who inherited your pre-surgery nose and they really, really hated it. Would you tell them that it was in fact your nose alighting their face, or would you be all, What? That ain't mine. Blame your mother."

[Prolonged pause. Head scratching.]

"Hmmm... To be honest, I've never really thought about it before."

"Why would you have thought about this before? It's a fucking weird question."

But I was aiming for R.L. Stine. Specifically his choose-your-own-adventure series.

2011-01-26T00:48:00.027+11:00

So I just ran a few segments of this very blog through I Write Like, which compares your writing to that of various authors and reveals your authorial twin. (Unlike the Gender Genie*, I Write Like's "statistical analysis" of your results isn't elaborated on, something which miffs the amateur statistician in me.)

First I got Chuck Palahnuik.
Then I got Margaret Atwood.

Then, George Orwell.

"Now you're just fucking with me I Write Like. Why would you do that to me? Can't you see how fragile I am?"

* The Gender Genie often tells me I write like a man, which I can see in a Hunter Thompson coked-out-of-his-mind kind of way, but I feel like I write about lots of Cosmo things, like hair and clothes** which should mitigate the results... God forbid that my frequent verbal references to my uterus have ever been cast in the written word.

**Okay, if I really wrote like a personified Cosmo I'd make rampant references to sex and all variations of the word. One of my favourite things to do while waiting for a checkout lane*** is to count the number of times the word 'sex'/'sexy'/'sexiest' appears on Cosmo covers. My record is five. (I am not the only one to notice this recursion.)

***Do people wait for checkout lanes anymore? I head for the self-checkout so I don't have to take my earphones off or like, interact with people. Tonight I reflexively hit the 'banana' key while weighing some cherries and was too lazy to call over a Fresh Food Person™ to cancel it, because then I'd have to take my earphones off. I effectively gave myself a 70% discount on cherries. Lots of people must ring up all their fruit and vegetables as bananas and eventually the major supermarkets will realise 'Hey, we haven't been selling this many bananas... but the difference by weight is EXACTLY the amount of baby spinach and cherries that we've been losing', they'll revoke self-checkouts and I'll be back to staring at Cosmo again.

NB: This entry (footnotes included) is written in a similar fashion to the fantasy-horror prose of H.P. Lovecraft, and the author has been estimated as female.

like a lake in your oxygen

2011-01-25T23:50:00.010+11:00

I took this photo in the village where my parents grew up. It was always unbearably hot and humid during the day; the dusty roads, and paths, and burnt-out lots of land meant you could feel your pores brimming with dirt. Even this lake, which was supposed to be something of an oasis, made me feel hopelessly unclean, with its too-still waters coated by a grimy film; Coke cans and cigarettes lining the perimeter. Sydney, even in the height of its humidity, will never feel like this.

I'm pretty sure the human body can acquire all necessary nutrients from sugar, hazelnuts & skim milk powder

2011-01-25T23:30:00.013+11:00

"What's with all the Nutella?"

"We need to stockpile for the apocalypse."

"Cool."

Does it count if the analogy was already sexual in nature?

2011-01-25T23:24:00.011+11:00

"Virgin hair is like, hair that's never been dyed or permed; so nothing's penetrated the shaft and --- Oh, man! Am I allowed to say, That's what she said, at the end of my own sentence?"

grew tired of each other's company

2011-01-18T20:57:00.013+11:00

long forgotten rooms & the distance travelled

2011-01-17T21:44:00.007+11:00

when i told you that we would change

2011-01-16T22:55:00.009+11:00

You don't get to say this if you now wear oversized hipster glasses, okay?

2011-01-15T00:29:00.006+11:00

"I'm pretty sure I was awkward in the face for about ten years. Ten years! A decade! That is a long time for someone's face to normalise itself."

The rat and the intersubjective shock, or whatever

2011-01-13T23:35:00.044+11:00

I have a fairly healthy fear of rats, which probably stems from not actually seeing one until I was about 14 (it was dead; I watched it dissolve into a pile of bones in a kind of slow motion time-lapse as I walked past it every afternoon).

In one of my final Psychology subjects we had to train rats. I had actually put off taking this subject for a year because I needed to mentally prepare myself for the genuine trauma of handling such filthy vermin. But eventually two semesters had been spent and I was faced with either handling a rat on a weekly basis, or suffering through the inanity of Abnormal or Individual Differences lectures. The exact content of the alternative subject escapes me now, but I knew my fate fell with rodents.

We were assigned partners to work with and my fellow rat-ring-leader was entirely apathetic to the entire ordeal, plucking our rat from the colony. I was horrified, horrified, by the length of its tail; its tiny, efficient claws and its eyes which were without any white.

So horrified that I took a photo:

Strangely, I don't remember what I named the rat. I think it was something really plain and serious, possibly the name of a Roman senator; or else it was without a name at all. In retrospect, I which I'd named it after our lecturer. Less strangely, I don't remember the name of the guy I was partnered with for the rest of the semester.

After our first tutorial we were asked to mark our rat's tail in a distinctive way so we could pick them out for the next class. Everyone took their black permanent markers and began drawing stripes along their rats' tails. I guess I had grown used to my rat after a good hour or so of watching it eat dry pellets, drink water and pee from total fear, so I turned to my partner and said:

"Well, I've got these highlighters, and there's a Sharpie in my bag. We should colour its fur."

He shrugged his shoulder, remaining indifferent.

I started colouring in our rat.

My partner suddenly snapped out of his comatose apathy and attempted to wrest the highlighter from my hand, coupled with a cry of, "Nooooo! What are you doing?"

This is the moment I realised that I was a truly weird person.

Suddenly through the eyes of this guy --who was so vanilla that I only really remember his hair (a sort of long-ish, blonde bowl cut) -- I had seen the clearest, most defined perception of myself. I realised then, that most people wouldn't think to colour in a rat with texta and highlighter in the name of undergraduate science, but to me this was just the most natural way to be able to identify our rat the next week. Logically, I knew that most people wouldn't choose to do this, but I didn't think it was so unusual as to warrant outright objection. In this single moment it suddenly made sense why I'd been told throughout the latter years of high-school, "You're so creative." But in a tone that might have suggested creativity was a disease rather than a thing of envy.

I looked at him while feeling affronted and puzzled; left in the wake of my revelation. He tried to rub the rat's fur clean.

I put my highlighter away and felt satisfied that the pink streak would last at least a week. (It did not).

For the rest of the semester I tried not to make any outlandish suggestions or use coloured writing implements in the presence of Vanilla Guy. I even became vaguely comfortable with lab rats during that time.

Sometimes I still wonder about Vanilla Guy. Like, how does he live? What is it like to believe that colouring in a rat has any dire consequence? Whatever became of his generic hair and perpetual apathy?

I am oddly grateful for him though, because being weird, or creative, or diseased, or different is ultimately out of your control and you need that moment to clarify it, to solidify the fact of it, so that you know how futile it is to even try to fight it.

waitin' for you to whittle away the time

2011-01-12T21:53:00.001+11:00

They actually gave me my own office because we kept having conversations like this:

2011-01-12T20:32:00.010+11:00

"I need to win this trip to India. You're my competition. You and Jodie. I may have mentioned this to her when I bumped into her the other day."

"Oh, God. You didn't threaten her, did you?"

"No... Her children maybe, but not her."

Plundering the past 'cause the present isn't worth talking about

2011-01-10T12:36:00.010+11:00

"The bartender was a cross between Nate Archibald of Gossip Girl and Clark Kent in that series about Superman as a chisel-jawed teenager, and even though he was really nice I sort of disliked him for being so obviously good-looking. Like, he'd probably gone his whole life knowing he was attractive and never had to doubt it, ever. Fucker. Anyway, I did the write-up at two the next morning, sent it to my editor straight away as requested, and she e-mailed me a few days later asking me to dumb it down because people don't understand "big words" like 'cynicism', 'innovation', 'ubiquitous' and 'mediocrity'. Mediocrity? Please. All people know what mediocrity is because we come to fear it so much."

in lieu of elegant words

2011-01-09T22:30:00.002+11:00

what we're chasing

2011-01-06T21:40:00.003+11:00

I'm probably going to regret posting this

2011-01-06T10:51:00.003+11:00

"God. Imagine what it's like to live at college. Everyone would get their period at once and there'd be like a tampon/pad shortage and even worse; a chocolate drought in the days before. And the harmonised PMS... I can't even remember what the function of having synced up periods is. Is it so we can get knocked up in unison and our babies then have a peer to interact with? That's kind of weird."

"I found this wasabi ice-cream and thought of you (because you inflict the pain of a thousand suns and have an irresistably questionable taste)."

2011-01-04T18:20:00.008+11:00

At first when I saw this in the fridge I thought my brother's girlfriend had bought it for him. It dawned on me that I was vaguely jealous, and that the most pressing motivation for me to be in A Serious Relationship would be the prospect of being given bizarre foods and concotions so strange as to be beyond the reaches of my imagination.

Anyway, it turns out he bought it for himself to indulge in during the dead of night. I didn't know he could be so... self-sufficient.

2011-01-03T17:38:00.012+11:00

prophylactastic adj. [proʊfə'læktæstɪk]

A portmanteau of 'prophylactic' and 'fantastic', used to denote the positive and effective use of condoms or similar protective measures. e.g. "Your iPhone case is prophylactastic."

Source: www.hellokittyzone.com

Because I might wear them for business meetings or something

2011-01-02T16:24:00.010+11:00

"But how will people take me seriously if my thongs have sparkles all over them?"

ten//eleven

2011-01-01T23:19:00.004+11:00

karaoke dens // kicked in the face // too tipsy to care

2010-07-28T11:10:00.004+10:00

deus ex machina

2010-07-26T22:56:00.001+10:00

But the Universe does want to see men in bikinis. Or at least, I do.

2010-07-07T23:32:00.010+10:00

"He is so pretty in the face, he could win Miss Universe."

"Now that's mean. He would be the inaugral Mr. Universe."

"Please, we will never have a Mr. Universe."

"Why not?"

"Because the Universe doesn't want to see men in bikinis."

"That's true..."

"Maybe if mankinis were more widely available... But the real reason we'll never have a Mr. Universe is that men just aren't valued for how hot they look while strutting down a catwalk in glittery attire, nor are they admired for vapidly professing their desire for world peace."

"World peace is kinda awesome though."

"Awesome like a fox."

[Pause]

"We would totally win Miss Universe."

Imagine never before laying eyes on an ibis. The first time you saw one, you'd probably scream.

2010-07-07T22:22:00.005+10:00

I'd never seen a young/baby/adolescent ibis before, so I got a shock chancing upon one in the backstreets of Redfern. It looks like the lovechild of a chicken and a vulture.

so many skylines that stretch across your eyes, across your life that stretches on so long

2010-07-06T00:34:00.004+10:00